


It's Only Me (Or, Five Times John Opened Up to Paul)

by bunnoculars



Category: The Beatles
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:59:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13556427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: John and Paul through the years. The more Paul gets to know John, the more he understands him. The more he understands him, the more he loves him. And the more he loves him, the worse it gets.





	It's Only Me (Or, Five Times John Opened Up to Paul)

**Liverpool 1957**

“No, like this.”

“Yes, like _this_. It’s what I’m doing.”

“No, look. Here—”

“Oi, mind the guitar! I know what I’m doing well enough, don’t I?”

“Yeah, right, well enough _now_.”

“Oh, piss off. It’s you making things difficult, yeh fecking left-handed git.”

“ _Really_ , John!”

Mimi’s voice sprang Paul’s back straight and sent clutching fingers to rescue his guitar as it slipped from his lap. The comfortable world of John’s bedroom was abruptly rearranged to accommodate the idea of people outside of him and John.

Paul could almost hear the shrieking gear shift within John as he swallowed back sarcasm dry as dust, _really, Mimi,_ came out with the requisite muttered apology even if he was only halfway to meaning it.

“Yes, well,” Mimi said, her stand in the doorway one for dignified middle-class austerity. “If you and your—” Her gaze cut to Paul and he read it as plainly as she did his accent and his clothes and the lot, “little friend—insist on this racket…”

Paul’s nerves jangled as an apology leapfrogged out of him, words tumbling out, “Ah, sorry about that, the noise and all…”

Paul was quelled by an acerbic quirk of John’s brow and the meaningful grim line of Mimi’s mouth. She continued, “If you insist on this racket, _John_ , you’ll have to go out to the porch. We’ve discussed this, I can hear you all the way from the sitting room.”

Her exit firmly punctuated her pronouncement, and Paul was accordingly jarred out of his complacent afternoon shut up with John and the guitar. He hadn’t gotten used to John’s house yet any more than he had figured out how to get on with his aunt, both ordered and sternly, manifestly posh, and therefore formidable. He’d been here a fair few times as June bled into July and the antique clock in Mimi’s sitting room fastidiously ticked away the summer; the first time, he’d tramped up the step, his charm his only weapon, which turned out bit knife, gun fight—got as far as hello before Mimi heard his voice and saw the guitar in his hand: “What has that boy got himself into _this_ time?”

John was formidable too, in contradictory but essential ways: he was more of a man at seventeen than Paul’s other friends, smoked and drank and fucked girls and could pull off not giving a fuck; he was too clever and up for anything, and he could pull off being himself. He was formidable but he was knowable, he was real in a way Paul thought he could know.

“Well, anyroad.” John cleared his throat, scrubbed his hands against his pants. He had set his guitar aside and he met Paul’s eyes with the defiance of someone who would just as soon look away. John did not admit to getting embarrassed, a brutal condition of his resolution against self-censorship. “I think that’s us finished, for the day. My fingers are cramping up already.”

“Yeah, the F’ll do that to you,” Paul said absently, before catching up rather abruptly from Mimi’s interruption—the day had reasserted itself, no longer an abstraction of cottony curtain-filtered sunlight and lazy daydreamed ambition, but a structure of knowing when and respecting other people’s time. “That’s a tricky one, though, the F, so keep at it. Right.”

“Right. Say, Paul—”

“Right.” The word was a mechanism of getting up, a precursor to shoving off.

“Paul.” John looked up at him, the smirk not yet on his lips cackling merrily in his eyes. “You wanna listen to some records, piss off the old bag a bit more?”

Paul wanted to say it wasn’t a good idea, probably, but if his guts didn’t vanquish the urge the soar of jubilation at this coveted invitation strangled it long before it could find voice. John now held infinitely more possibilities than the temperament of his aunt. Paul affected nonchalance with a shrug and a grin too bright to pass muster because with John these things were too significant to let on if he could help it, and settled back down at the foot of the bed. 

Their shoulders bumped as John got up to root around his record collection and their elbows knocked when he returned to sit beside Paul. Fats Domino, just loud enough to be a danger and just low enough to stay a rude secret.

“She lives to have a go at me, does Mimi, thrives on it.” Paul snapped back from the seduction of roaring sax and jamming piano keys, back to John, leaving his twitching foot behind with Fats. John’s grin strained against the sudden tightness of his mouth. “My mum. Julia. She doesn’t give me shit half as much as Mimi does.”

Paul didn’t say anything; something in John’s face made him cautious, and he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know as much as he wanted John to tell him. Shotton had let him in on the vagaries of the Thing About John’s Mum and Paul had left it at knowing she wasn’t dead. Didn’t deal with the subject of mothers too well, didn’t like to think.

John’s tense expectancy expired under Paul’s silence and unfurled recalcitrant into curiosity. Paul held himself stoic under the blunt surgery of his scrutiny.

“She fucked off when I was a wee lad, y’know,” John burst out at last like Paul had forced his hand. There was a lunatic edge of laughter to his voice that separated the admission from naked confession. The words came on like a sudden fever. “After me dad fucked off first. Things weren’t—with him gone, and all…I mean, we still keep up, she taught me banjo chords, the lot. Turns out they’re rubbish, but.”

Paul did not want to look at John right then, but as it was he couldn’t look away. Bravado in the face of awkwardness defused into a bracing, bald honesty and Paul was struck with the intuition that he did not know John yet. He stared hard enough into John’s eyes that his vision prickled, driving force behind his sudden absurd urge to see the person lurking there out of sight.

In a blink of time, he returned to his body, realized Fats was still playing and his foot was still going. He realized too, far too late, that he should have said something. He coughed. “Mimi’s not all bad, though, is she.”

He should have said something and that definitely wasn’t it, but John let out a hearty guffaw and his shoulders loosened because it seemed with him, saying the wrong thing was always right.

“You’re a fucker, Paul,” he said, his words alive with a casual sort of affection Paul had never before heard. Slow-rising panic eased in his chest, suffusing him with second-hand relief. “And Mimi’s a miserable old cow.” John shot him a furtive look and kicked at his foot, which went still. “Maybe I ought to come round your place next time.”

Cognition stalled in Paul’s mind. He couldn’t disown Frothlin Road the way John had Mendips. Having John over meant explaining about his own mum, and there was this towering head of ambivalence there, born of fear and reticence that they had just now rendered hypocritical—but he hadn’t asked John, hadn’t wanted to ask. Didn’t want to think. His mother—

“I dunno, my dad’s a bit, uh. But he’s all right, really.” Paul fumbled over the words, nerves frenetic and brain jammed as they careened forward into some kind of conclusion. His glance at John buffeted back against the blunt turn of his profile, and that was it. “It’s just. My mum’s dead.”

Paul thought, _my mother is dead_.

“Dead,” John was startled into repeating, just as he was startled into looking over at Paul again. His brows jerked together into a caustic frown that pinched the glacial howling turmoil inside Paul, made the pain recede for that instant. “Makes you think. That’s a bit final, isn’t it?”

Ain’t that a shame, Fats Domino sang jauntily.

They stared at each other for long moments, bared to each other in grotesque new ways: Paul could almost feel it as the delicate twisted skeleton of their friendship solidified into something that might bear their collective weight.

“Makes you think, Paul,” John mused, eyes glinting and the curl of his lip working to reconcile his smirk with his smile. “You’re a good sort of lad, get good marks, follow the rules, listen to your dad, even if…well. You’re not one to fuck around. I’m going to ruin your life, aren’t I?”

 

**Hamburg 1960**

One minute Paul was making it with this bird who’d been making eyes at him all night, and the darkness of the backroom was an improvement from the harsh yellow lights of the club: here she was whatever he wanted her to be, her skin could be as smooth as it now looked, hair bleached blond and—

And.

Next minute he was in the grungy ladies’ toilet across the hall, watching John throw water on his face with half a mind to clobber him, ears still ringing with the girl’s shrieks and mind short-circuiting on shades of John’s apoplectic eyes.

“What. The. Fuck.” He breathed hard and fast. “ _What the fuck_ , John! What, what…”

John met his eyes in the mirror, a dripping picture of sardonic half-wild sanity. “Now once more with feeling, Paul.”

“John, you,” the angry disbelief was surging jerkily through his system like the aftershock of a lightening strike, whiting his mind out to incoherence, “You’re a bloody fucking lunatic, you, the prellies, you’re practically frothing at the mouth, for God’s sake, the fucking _prellies_ —!” John jerked round to face him, scraping wet clinging hair off his forehead, and opened his mouth, so Paul lurched on. “ _You can’t go around cutting up girls’ clothes, John!_ And I can’t go around having to tell you stuff like that, I mean, Jesus goddamn Christ.”

“Wasn’t that big a blow, was it, bird seemed the type to spend more time out of that dress than in.” At his glare John snapped, incomprehensibly vexed. “Oh fuck off! If I wanted someone harping at me I’d’ve packed Mimi. God, you’re a drag when you’re pissed.”

“And you!” Paul shouted, the twist of John’s mouth setting off like a firecracker ricocheting up his ribs. “Out of your fooking mind!”

“I don’t know if,” John muttered, but when Paul started to go off again, he seized him by the arms and bellowed, “All right! I’m out of me fucking mind right now, Christ, just. Give a man a chance to come down.” His fingers were fever hot and brittle, biting into Paul’s skin to give him the impression of reality. “Paul, listen. Listen, I’ve been thinking and—”

“Oh right, thinking,” Paul retorted, fury leveling off indefinitely to steep at this barest admission of guilt. Living with John in itself had grown to be a concession to John’s mad habits and moods and had honed picking his battles into fine-tuned instinct. “Bit of an unexpected turn, considering what you just.”

His voice stumbled away from him as John’s, “For God’s sake, I’m not having this fight in the ladies’ toilet,” steered him out of the lavatory and into the hallway. John stopped and turned to face him so suddenly Paul near walked into him and they stood nose to nose; Paul’s skin shrunk too tight against his bones but he did not flinch.

“Okay then,” said John, eerily, shallowly transfixed on Paul, face that of a sickly technicolor ghost in the half light filtering in from the stairwell: he’d completely lost it and now he was scrabbling for whatever scattered shred of himself that might remain. “You want to have it out about the band, so here I am, have a go at me. I’ve had my thoughts.”

“What?” Popped out of him, a half-reaction. 

“I know what you’re about, Paul,” John said placidly, and Paul wanted to say, _this is about you, you berk_. “You haven’t let it go, clearly, so if we’re going to have to, might as well.”

Earlier, not John’s ranting and raving and the vicious random snip of scissors earlier, then, but earlier, smoke and leather and little white pills and bass lines so tortured that hearing them was like second-hand pain. The same old shit, in other words. John didn’t want to hear it and Paul couldn’t stop hearing it, didn’t want to be shut up, _wanted_ with the fury of his being.

“Wanker,” Paul said, false start, burning creeping up his throat and mouth gone dry, bone-weary but working up for another round. John watched him; whatever he saw, Paul could not. “Look here, John. I’m not doing this when I’m the only one making any bleeding sense.”

“We’re doing it then, because I’m going to make sense, I’m made of sense,” John said, aspect oddly haggard, mission clutched grimly in hand. Paul started in spite of himself. “Now listen to me make sense, Paul: you can’t keep fighting me on every little fucking thing.”

And that it was it: round two came roaring in.

“I don’t,” Paul retorted. “Half the time I just keep my mouth shut, because every fucking time I bring _anything_ up, you put me off—”

“Yes, well!” John said very fast, wedging the words in to block off the torrent of recriminations now backlogged past Paul’s conscious. “Keep your mouth shut the rest of the time too, is all I’m saying. I can’t, things can’t work like this.” John sighed explosively, nostrils flaring. “Look, Paul, what I’m trying to say is, this band only works when us two work, and it can’t work when you’re fighting me on it, can it. God, it’s pissing me off just thinking about it now.”

“Oh, well, if it’s pissing _you_ off, John,” Paul snarled. “You can say that, you have last say on everything! And how come we’re not working out—it’s because we’re not going anywhere! And at this rate we’re, it’s not gonna get any better until you wake up, ‘well gee, guess Paul was right about that one.’” Laughter scraped up from his chest, bitter and brittle. “At least _my_ mate could actually _play a fucking instrument_ —”

John responded with a cackle that was like the hysteria of spitting up razor blades: unamused cross-purposes. “See, here we are again, have you been fucking listening at all? To hell with Stu and George, and, and the fucking drummer, is what I’m saying. But we need the drummer and the bass, and, and George, and there’s not one single fucking bloody thing to be done about it! _I’m_ not fucking you over, Paul, _you’re_ fucking around with me. This. The band.”

“Oh, I am, am I?” It spat up dangerous like hellfire, died like ashes on his tongue.

“Yes,” John said simply, eyes boring into him painfully, like he wasn’t sure if what he saw was what he wanted to see. Paul had the infuriating, impossible sense that John was that close to smiling.

The silence was brusque, drawn taut like the tug of war between them, and John’s manic gaze ate up the void it left. Paul swallowed. His heart was hammering and his blood simmered; his vision was slit against his narrowed angry eyes and he felt like he was on the precipice of taking wild, unknown measures.

Then John lurched forward and kissed him.

Sudden aching pressure on his lips, drawn into a tight scowl and already bruised from the all-important anticlimax of the girl in his bed. A confused breath, a fumble of a hand on the back of his neck as Paul struggled with himself. Thoughtless and weightless but struggling, and suddenly it all seared through him like too much reality, like the bright relentless ecstasy of six hour shows. Guitar strap digging into his shoulder. Voice blistering through his throat. John’s razor sharp grin a commentary that took account of everything for Paul better than he could for himself.

John kissing him.

Paul kissed him back and John groaned and thrust his hand in Paul’s hair and then they were kissing for real, the moment an anchor that yanked at them tersely as they spiraled headlong into this new unknown insanity.

John’s lips were soft but his mouth was hard and demanding. His tongue forced its way deep into Paul’s mouth even as he opened for him and then turned teasing, wet and hot stroking delicately against his own as they struggled with breath. Paul’s brain combusted and his knees buckled against the explosion of heat in his gut; he grappled at John, clutched at his shoulders and leaned in against him so there wasn’t an inch of space between them. John shuddered and then grunted against his mouth as their teeth clacked together; he dragged himself a breath away but tugged Paul’s lower lip with him in a gentle bite.

Paul’s mind was out of order but turned on and his thoughts a broke down record, _this is John this is John this is John_ and he wasn’t sure if they provided the context, or if the wired jump of muscle and bone beneath his hands did. He had never, he hadn’t realized it could be. John was fevered flat planes and angles, eyes and mouth deadpan quirks, alien in his familiarity; but John _was_ , craziest cleverest funniest sweetest, like a fun house of all his secret sides. On a level alone with Paul, at its lowest the worst kind of hell and at its highest the very best kind, so alive they were going crazy with it.

Like now. He held onto the certainty that this changed nothing: he carried the truth around with him like a spy’s cyanide pill, the last, best hope he could unfailingly turn to—simply, that there was no way to explain what could bear no explanation. Paul could not explain John to himself, and therefore did not need to explain the things he brought him to, the strange and relentless path John was dragging him along. They would both find out when they got there.

John lifted himself from Paul’s lips and met his gaze in hazy resentment that he could think at all. Paul shivered as rough fingers whispered across the nape of his neck.

“Christ, you drive me mad, sometimes,” he said matter-of-factly, voice gone low and hoarse in a way that jolted through Paul in another transmission of arousal, thoughts coursing through his blood and heartbeat in his brain.

“Not too far a drive, though, is it?” Paul muttered, ambushed by the smirk that tugged up the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah, that’s right.” John’s eyes heavy-lidded and blown black flicked down and he brought his hand up to brush a thumb across Paul’s lips. Paul’s breathing hitched in his chest. “It’s a dreadful crime, you know. Taking advantage of a nutter. What were we talking about?”

This time it was softer, sweeter. A promise that couldn’t hold faith in the filthy hallway of a club in the Reeperbahn at four o’clock in the morning. But it was building up to something, that same thing.

Until. There was a creak on the stairs and then someone was galumphing up up up, quick-footed but ungainly with drink.

Paul shoved John away, back of his hand skittering jerkily over his mouth. John stumbled back, watched him stupidly. Paul catalogued his features, swift second nature, did not register his own shock as he took in the softened set of his jaw and the lazy blink of his eyes: some time during, during the two of them, John had come down to himself. 

“Uh, what,” Stuart said, his voice crashing down over-loud on Paul, who gave him the best bit of smile he could manage. The effort Stu took to figure them out played across his face. “Well, um. What’re you.” He gave up. “Astrid and I, we had a bit of a night. You know that friend of hers…”

“Not Sod Off something or other?” John suggested. Stuart and Paul stared as Paul clamped down grimly on the wild meaningless glee that danced savage and shameless around his cowed meaningful doubts.

Silence blew up to deaden the air of all mania and possibility and everything sunk into Paul instead, settling in his bones: sudden complete exhaustion of exhilaration.

John cleared his throat, worked his hand through his hair as his eyes shuttered and his mouth went finally, impossibly dead. “Think I’m going to turn in. My head, think I’m coming down for good now, nothing left for it. Got to sleep it off.”

He was feeling it too, then.

When he was gone Stuart gave Paul a rare commiserating look, _oh great, just John being John again_ , before retiring himself. Paul stared after them, tired and aching beyond the thinking of it but young and riddled with life.

Paul was aware of John’s inner workings enough to know that his vigil of self-awareness was his greatest virtue and single biggest fault: John realized what he said and did well enough, and that was John being John—it was just a matter of whether he cared or not.

 

**Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1963**

John was like a metronome, pacing back and forth in front of him, clipped and hard and just this side of irritating.

“You wanna talk about it?” he said, careful to keep his face turned down to the guitar in his lap, holding vigil out of the corner of his eyes.

“No,” John snapped peevishly. Then: “What?” Pause because he knew playing dumb with Paul doomed from the outset. Paul waited and sure enough, confrontation, “I mean, would you?” Another pause. “Do you?”

Ah-ha, vulnerability. If Paul felt like going in for the kill there was John’s underbelly, and as much as anything, he was irritated with the temptation, _no, I don’t want to talk about you and how you’ve fucked up because you’re a fuck up, but it’s Wednesday, and everyone else is getting damn sick of you._

“No, not really,” Paul said calmly, plucking out a chord, thoughtless but never tuneless. “Brian reckoned I ought to, y’know. You’ve been a right bastard since, John.”

“Oh, really, Paul. A right bastard, me. Whatever tipped you off, I wonder,” John sneered, stopping midstride to turn to him. “To what do you attribute it? Being boxed in with such a nosy git all the time, perhaps?”

John’s voice snapped Paul’s last nerve like a rubber band. John wanted to get a rise out of him, and the truth was he wouldn’t have to try much harder.

“Fine, then,” he said shortly. “Let’s get to work.”

“Fine.” Rapid-fire return salvo before John wrestled for self-control and promptly, inevitably failed: Paul could read the loss in the curl of his lip and the cock of his hips. “Here’s a thought. Could it be I’ve finally had enough of writing for screaming twelve-year-olds?”

Paul’s strangled the neck of his guitar in his brittle grip, bare boned skeleton that had been chasing itself round his head skittering to pieces, _she said she loves you, love like that, you know it can’t be bad._

“If you don’t want to work.”

Barely bit the words out before he could feel his own sneer twisting his face, sapping up bitter disdain from his uglier insides. Good of John to take a stand on something this hypocritical—nothing substantive had changed, they still wrote the same, felt the same, but put on a tie and get an audience, and they were selling themselves down the river. And he was only saying this now to say it; by tomorrow, it would be something different.

“Oh, come on, Paul, it’s hardly work for you, is it,” John said malevolently, yanking impatiently at Paul’s temper before it could unfold, take shape. “You get off on it.”

“I get off on screaming twelve-year-olds, is that it,” Paul said. He’d had enough. “John, I’m not going to, okay, I’ll talk but I’m not. So find someone else to—”

“You get off on all this,” John pressed, taking Paul’s self-control personally; he gestured viciously, “this shit. All these reporters sticking their fucking noses in everything we do, girls slobbering over Beatle Paul, isn’t he cute. Anything for a bit of press, bit of attention! You know it’s yourself you’re selling, like a whore—”

“John.” His voice was cold and hard enough to cut to the bone, tempered in the roiling angry furnace of his ribcage. He was building up a head of smoke but anger gave him tunnel-vision clarity. He set aside his guitar.

John lingered over Paul’s expression, heavy-eyed and an odd infuriating half-smile splitting his face.

“Just so long as everybody loves you, it’s good enough, isn’t that right?”

Paul was up before he knew what he was doing: it was instinct that hooked his fingers in John’s collar and instinct that walked them back into the wall; instinct too, that John’s smile vanished and he went still as Paul attacked his buttons furiously, determined to get this over with.

Instinct: they’d both known it would come down to this, that John had let himself get like this and was pushing him because Paul would be pushed. This was the way things worked between them now, broken down in some intricately extrinsic way, couldn’t repair it without everything grinding to a halt. So they lived with it and John made the worst and best of it.

Paul’s heartbeat was like a hummingbird in his chest, a distant inconsequential murmur. John was solid and warm against him and it was more than Paul could bear to want; knew it was all-important to get out from under John’s heavy gaze before it pinned him down, so he evaded the slant of John’s lips and the stutter of his breath, pressed himself to his side and tucked his face into John’s neck instead as he jerked open his fly and got a hand inside his trousers.

John groaned loudly and bucked up into his grip almost before he got his fingers around the hot, silken girth of him, not all the way there yet but getting there fast. His hand scrabbled inelegantly up Paul’s arm to cup his neck.

“Fuck, Paul, that’s,” he breathed lowly. The sound of John forming his name electrified him and in one split second shutting down was rendered impossible. “So not everybody then. God knows you’ve ruined me for anyone else.”

Paul bit his lip and concentrated instead, jerking faster, twisting his wrist and rushing to meet the inevitable conclusion, to keep John from unraveling so completely and twisting Paul up in all of it, before he had to let it mean something it couldn’t. John laughed, staggered and sharp, a wild, painful stab in the dark, drew ragged breath and loosed himself.

“How do you always know, you’re always exactly what I like, oh fuck, I, I can’t, do you know what I want to do to you, Paul, sometimes I can’t think of anything else and—”

In desperation Paul raised his head and stuck his tongue in his mouth, clawed a hand through John’s hair to pull him in. John made a choked off sound, breath coming in harsh and desperate pants against Paul’s face as he slid his lips against Paul’s and his staring eyes slid closed. Then one last pull and John sobbed into his mouth, came into his hand.

The world went red against Paul’s eyelids. He drew away from John, wiping his hand perversely across John’s thigh, and listened to John’s breathing calming down to pattern his own. Yearning for simplicity swept powerfully through his system—he was hard and wanting, knew what he wanted—and it crippled but couldn’t kill his monolithic resolve: he could not give himself over to John, or there would be nothing left of him for anything else. Not for the fans or the, the bloody reporters, for George and Ringo, the Beatles. 

“C’mere,” John said gently. Paul looked up and met John’s eyes blown wide open and nakedly honest. His hair was wrecked, shirt was half undone and fly was open, his own come stiffening across his pant leg. He did not care, and in that moment, neither did Paul.

John reached for him, ducking in to kiss him tenderly, hand slipping under Paul’s shirt and spanning hot across the small of his back, the other undoing his pants.

A moan rose up through his chest when John touched him and he did not resist it, insensible at John’s mercy, the whole of his being momentarily distracted by the pulses of pure pleasure wracking him as John’s callused hand stroked him.

It was over too soon.

They sat together in the aftermath, rumpled and sweaty and sunk down against the wall where they had stood, shoulders leaning into each other, the past week bombed out and fleeting between them, words the only thing left now. John lit a cigarette, took a drag and passed it over to Paul, slyly deadpan, and relief—Paul was helpless against the laugh that rose up solicited.

“I always knew I could come to that, but I,” John said eventually: Paul was ready to smile so John was ready to talk. “I never thought I’d do it, y’know? I mean, I thought, when I was, I thought, I could kill this guy. I might’ve been close, God, I. I don’t even know.”

“But you didn’t, so.” It was a fallback, granted, but Paul found himself in dead earnest. “’s fucked up, but that’s gotta count for something.”

John took a greedy draw of the ciggie, cheeks hollowing. “But I’m the sort who would. I dunno, that’s what’s killing me, who the fuck does he think he is, this John Lennon fella?”

His pulse was jumping with the pull for nicotine, but he held off, allowing John the privilege of dire circumstance. He swallowed, rubbed itching palms against his legs, and abstractly recognized those hands as his.

“Who is anybody, though?” he said dispassionately. “Everyone gets like that, catch your own eye in the mirror and you’re bound to say, who _is_ that? Just like another part of the day.”

“But I don’t, I’ve never!—done that, is what I’m saying, Paul. That’s not me.”

Annoyance flared in Paul at this mythic certainty of self as small memories niggled at him, John first slipping on his glasses weeks into their friendship, coming home to find John in his drainies and boots, eating family dinner with his dad and Mike, John sleepless and dead-eyed on a diet of booze and prellies.

Paul had his own myths of self, though: keeping his peace was keeping faith. 

Paul leveled John with his firmest gaze, snatched the ciggie from between John’s fingers. “Well, there’s your problem, then: you’ve never beaten a man half to death before, either, far as I know.”

“No, it’s not that I—” His voice rose and died, strangled in his frustration. Paul smoked and waited him out, did not let himself flinch from the sight of John staring short-sightedly at his knees, brow crimped and mouth lopsided: lost and voiceless. Then. “I’m married and, and all of the sudden I’ve got a bleeding kid, for Christ’s sake. And I can’t go anywhere, or do fucking anything, without half the world having something to say about it.” He met Paul’s eyes with the bewildered desperation of a condemned man. “And I don’t know what the hell happened to _me_ in all this. And the thing—the thing with Brian was like waking up and not knowing where I was, or what the fuck was happening, and, and he sort of talked me through it—”

Paul wished for the love of God that John would shut the fuck up, if there was one thing he did not want to hear about, didn’t matter if it was just talk and just talk between John and Brian too apparently, so long as it wasn’t anything it couldn’t be between John and Paul. He was seized with a pathological desire for enough booze to bleach out John’s words before they branded his memory of this moment.

Too late.

“You’d been going with Cyn for years,” Paul reasoned with him, quietly and from the cut of John’s mouth, cruelly. “And we’ve known each other six, you’re the one started up this whole thing, the band and everything. You can’t just go and say…”

“I think I was afraid of what could have happened,” John confessed suddenly, like Paul had cornered him into it, threatened him with worse. He plucked the cigarette from Paul’s nerveless fingers, skin of their fingertips brushing like a broke down secret. “That’s why I beat the shit out of Wooler.”

He exhaled smoke, tapped ashes jittery onto the floor.

“John, you don’t,” Paul began, faltered, arrested by the caustic flick of John’s eyes from nowhere to him. He steeled himself. “You knew what could. Would happen.”

John spoke to him with characteristic, masochistic directness, solo mission to no good end: “I thought I did, yeah. But then, the real thing’s never quite how you were picturing it, is it?”

 

**Key West 1964**

Paul was drunk and he quite preferred things that way.

The world had gone mellow, and before as John had helped him over to the bed, had spun round gently like a carousel. In theory, there was a storm happening off wherever they were supposed to be, but he lived in a bubble that for once was its own secret, warm and soft around the edges, keeping its peace. This suite was it, had everything in it, his Hofner, George and Ringo snoring across the way. John sprawled out next to him on the bed, tingling where their arms overlapped.

“I always thought you had to be cooler than you let on,” John said intelligently. They were getting to the heart of things now, the still beating heart of random intricate parts of each other. “You looked like Elvis, that’s what I, when I saw you. I never tried to be cool meself, of course—”

“—‘course—”

“—I just sort of—”

“You just sort of were,” Paul finished generously, nodding at the ceiling.

John was deadly quiet for a moment. Getting at the heart, no doubt, might require some digging, some sort of bloody incomprehensibly complex surgery.

“I thought you were cooler when I found out your mum was dead,” John said at last, baldly. It hit him like a pulled sucker-punch, body flinching back but no pain registering. John took a deep breath, released it in a slow whistling sigh. “I thought that was real, or something, I don’t know.” Significance paused to darken his words. “And now I know.”

“It’s all right, John,” Paul said clumsily, feeling it was essential that he forgive John, even if there was nothing for him to forgive.

But that done, he was left to find a yawning pit opened inside him and for the life of him he could find no way to cross back to safety. He was afraid of what was down there, of what he knew was…It had been so long since he’d last touched that part of himself, maybe too long.

“I can’t remember my mum’s face.” The confession was crushing blackly in on him and the only release was out with it. “It’s been years and I, I can’t remember her hardly at all.”

“You still feel the same about her, though, that’s something, Paul, isn’t it?” John said. His voice seemed in a great hurry, emergency provisions to keep Paul from caving in till he could get there with him. He cleared his throat. “I get angry sometimes, myself. Thinking about what it should have been like. And then I realize I’m the lowest sort of scum, for even thinking. God.”

John’s voice sent a mighty tremor through Paul’s being and he rattled closer to the edge of that warm and close abyss. He could sort of see how this was going to end, now, could sense it in his moonlit mind and the tide rising in his chest.

So he knew the ending and the only thing left was to give it away, “And sometimes you think, did I even know her, you know? I was, we were just kids, and it was so. I was so alone.”

“Paul,” John said, intimately startled by the revelation. “Paul, are you crying?”

Paul’s throat closed in a sob and his eyes swam in the perversely gentle swell of devastation, but there it was, all over, and he was no longer wretched and desolate, clinging to the edge of control and drowning, but powerfully, tragically whole.

And he had John with him: “Well,” said John, “why shouldn’t you be?”

Paul had loved his mum and he loved her still, loved her in a way he could never again since she’d gone, with all the innocence of his being that was now breathing out its death rattle. John was the same way, had loved his mum the same way, and now here they were: damaged goods.

“It’s what makes us alike, you know, you and I.” John didn’t sound much different for his tears, thinned out to a jagged point and outlook turned inward. He gave a hearty sniff. “We’ve got bits of ourselves that’re missing and we keep trying to find them in each other.”

Paul surrendered himself to John’s pain just as he had his own. It took courage he did not know he possessed, perhaps borrowed from the whiskey and the faceless dark of night; it terrified him all the same.

“John, I want you to,” he began on the crest of a deep wavering breath, before renewed misery wrung his voice out. He hacked, better to feel it wrack his bones than hear his own sobs. “I didn’t, I’m not hanging around because I’m messed up about our mums, John. Are we?”

“See, I can’t make sense of a thing you’ve said but I understand you. See what I mean.”

John sounded enigmatic, abstract, perhaps carried off from Paul in this, their pooled ocean of grief, and drowning. It was more than his final vestige of shame could withstand, the confusion of his fear; he let go and flailed ferociously, desperately, nonsensically for immediacy. “John. John…” John did not answer or Paul could not hear him over the violence of his own sobs as he cried harder; his fingers were thick and clumsy and trembling as they reached for John. “I, you have to know. I’m here for _you_. Not the, any of the rest of it.”

Paul’s fingers were crushed under John’s weight as he belatedly turned over and it was too much too sudden, seeing John’s face like this, letting him see his own. His own eyes itched to see John’s red and heavy with tears but they were clear John-eyes as they stared into Paul’s. 

“Good God, Paul, don’t cry, now,” John admonished him, contradictory, made the tears fall faster but somehow marshaled the tremulous waterlogged muscles in Paul’s face into a secret smile. “You know that’s what I’ve _been_ saying, stop stepping on me lines, Paul. That I love you. And that’s all I think, no rest of it.” 

Here they were, John and Paul, rawness of their insides dragged up to their outsides and nothing left that wasn’t between them: when Paul looked into John’s eyes, he saw John as he had always known him to be.

Maybe it was the tears and the drunk; maybe it was the dark nameless hotel room and the storm that stood in for them; maybe it was John’s face, exactly as it was, right then. For the first and maybe the only time in his life, Paul released the words locked deep in the dungeons of his soul, allowed himself that one unspeakable answer to his being.

“Me too, I. I love you too, John.”

 

**London 1967**

John was the Emperor of the Universe.

Every fiber of Paul’s being was tied into John’s and vibrated with his every thought, and their selves melted together as they sat and stared into each other’s eyes: there could be no Paul where there was no John, just as there could only be Paul where there was John. Everything John touched within him came alive and that was everything. It felt like it had been this way forever, since the dawn of time and spanning Paul’s entire existence, and it would be forever, as long as the lights danced in John’s eyes and Paul’s bones kept everything else inside him standing. Forever as long as time meant this same thing.

All was as it should be.

“I know,” said John.


End file.
